Coinbase site crashes during bitcoin sell off

Bitcoin has been doing extremely well this week, at least up until Wednesday when the price of bitcoin dropped more than $1,700 in the span of 15 minutes.

At the same time, the Coinbase site experienced an outage with both its website and API rendered temporarily inaccessible. According to Coinbase’s status page, the exchange reported major outages across its website, mobile apps and API, though its internal systems appeared to be functional during that period. Coindesk contacted Coinbase, and was told, “We’re back up.” And at 5:17 ET, the exchange’s status page noted: “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.”

Yesterday’s crash follows a degraded performance report on June 25 and another crash incident on June 24, both of which were resolved within an hour of reporting.

Apparently trading app Robinhood also reported issues with its crypto trading service. Its platform became inaccessible for both mobile and desktop devices at around 20.45 UTC.

Coindesk reports that BTC’s price was at about $13,685 just prior to the fall, hitting $11,908.11 before bouncing back upwards — a difference of roughly $1,785. At the time of writing, it is trading around the $12,167 mark.

And, according to BitMex, nearly $250 million in volume traded hands in a 5-minute period surrounding the initial price drop. BitMEX, which is the world’s single biggest bitcoin derivatives provider, also reported more than $1 billion of open interest on the market. Trading topped $13 billion, with the number topping $16 billion across the platform’s product range. Bitmex CEO, Arthur Hayes declared that the bear market was well and truly over. He tweeted, “XBTUSD perp swap open interest is now in the 3 comma club. Welcome to the 2019 bull fucking market YeeHaw!”